A Crocodile Killed Autonomy

The Australian art world is in mourning. This week Queensland police confirmed that the backpack and some human remains found near a rudimentary campsite on the banks of the Gilbert River in far north Queensland belonged to the performance artist known as Autonomy.

All signs indicate that the forty-one-year-old woman was killed by a crocodile. Police have established that she had been living for several weeks at the water’s edge of an estuary known to be the habitat of large saltwater crocodiles. A significant quantity of crystal methamphetamine was found among her belongings.

A police spokesman said the artist’s decision to camp alone among the dangerous animals and her seeming neglect of basic precautions was foolhardy in the extreme. Autonomy’s brother, speaking on behalf of the long-estranged family, urged his sister’s admirers not to imitate her activities: they were dangerous and could easily prove fatal.

What follows is the last interview granted by Autonomy three years ago. At that time, an edited version was published in the Contemporary Art Journal. We reprint it here in full, with the previously elided sections in brackets. We offer this as a tribute to a confronting but compelling Australian artist who was notorious for her high-risk, physically-demanding actions that challenged notions of freedom, coercion and human identity.

CAJ: In recent years your art has been exclusively performance art. What led you away from creating art objects?

Autonomy: [Isn’t that obvious?] After the Venice Biennale I stopped painting and sculpting. I saw that I was participating in a fetish-manufacturing industry whose self-importance was alarming. Humanity—whom I don’t particularly like and struggle to respect—doesn’t need more idols masquerading as art.

CAJ: Don’t people, including you, need beautiful objects or inspiring ideals?

Autonomy: We think we need them, but our desire is tepid. We pretend we value freedom, for example, but we all conform slavishly to any number of expectations, obligations and constraints, including physical constraints. We’re pathetic beings frightened by our own potential and unwilling to test our individual power, like dogs who love their leashes.

CAJ: There is a remarkable consistency to your work. Your 2012 performance, 17 Episodes of Unconsciousness, could be performed today and would be an accurate reflection of your current preoccupations. Is consistency something you strive for?

Autonomy: First, I don’t see it as work. It’s a type of tantrum against the capricious strictures that confront us. In 17 Instances of Unconsciousness, I was frustrated at my own being which requires that I continue to breathe: by whose rule and decree was this imposed on me? “Screw it!” I thought, “I choose not to breathe!” I couldn’t perform the action in the Sydney Gallery for the Summer Arts Festival [because of their ridiculous O. H. & S. rules], so I recorded it at a friend’s studio, handed over the footage, and the Gallery[’s gutless curators] screened it in a dark corner of the building on a tiny monitor hoping no one would see it. But it became the big hit of the whole inglorious shebang. Second, consistency is not something I strive for: why strive for yet another arbitrary ideal?

CAJ: You followed that performance with another, much more damaging, action, Through the Walls, in which you repeatedly threw yourself, naked, against a variety of physical barriers. Did you have the same intention of measuring existence, of pushing yourself?

Autonomy: It was never about pushing myself—that’s the talk of athletes and their coaches. I wanted to confront and defeat different kinds of physical boundaries: walls and fences. After all, these things are going up everywhere! For some reason, probably from fear, humanity seems to need to be boxed in. I refuse to acknowledge the power of these bullying obstacles. The point to remember is that I was able to penetrate some of the barriers.

CAJ: You were able to crawl through the coils of razor wire, but with severe lacerations and significant blood loss requiring emergency hospitalisation and multiple transfusions. Other barriers were impenetrable: the brick wall and laminated glass doors remained undamaged whereas you were badly injured and needed another spell in hospital. The video of you battering yourself against concrete blocks and locked doors and suffering broken bones and concussions is hard to watch.

Autonomy: What’s harder to watch is people happily embracing roles and conforming to the universe without either wonder or disgust. As someone said, it’s hard to kick against the pricks.

CAJ: Did you make a full recovery from those injuries?

Autonomy: [That’s irrelevant, or maybe it’s relevant: I don’t know and neither do you.] Words like “recovery” and “injuries” are loaded with positive or negative connotations, but on what basis can we use such words, charged as they are with our values? We project our meaning onto whatever we think is reality but it’s probably only a fragment of reality: I can’t smell anywhere near as well as a bear or see anywhere near as well as a hawk. Humans possess mediocre senses. Why should I or anybody else presume to know reality?

CAJ: You film your performances and screen them in art spaces; does that mean communication at least is important to you?

Autonomy: No. Communication is important to other people, not to me. Much of what I do is simply exploring life. Other people decide it needs to be videoed and on a whim I sometimes agree to it being screened in a gallery. But that’s only a fraction of my life and perhaps not even the most significant part, although I reject terms like “important” or “significant”; they’re comparatives that lack any clear superlative.

CAJ: Do you see yourself as an artist?

Autonomy: No, I see myself as a particular being, not necessarily a human being because, again, “human” is a word with very precise connotations, as is the word “artist”. Those connotations direct us to behave in certain prescribed ways: doing art if you define yourself as an artist; wearing clothes, not voiding your bowels or having sex in public, etcetera, horribly etcetera, if you define yourself as a human.

CAJ: Does it please you that music by your band Autarky is used in movies?

Autonomy: Keep it in perspective: a snippet of one track was used in one film, during a scene where a man kills a donkey.

CAJ: But the film won an Academy Award!

Autonomy: [Ugh! Who cares? Who cares?] Humans are so confused and clueless that awards and honours from anybody anywhere are best viewed, as I think Kierkegaard said, as a form of unconscious sarcasm. I rejoiced in our small piece of that fantastic sarcasm, and viewed it as such.

CAJ: When Enjinue invited Autarky to open her Australian concerts in 2009, your CD became a cult classic. Can we expect another album?

Autonomy: [Why? Because we owe it to the people?] For me, the appeal of Autarky was that not one of us could properly play or even accurately tune our instruments. Since then the other band members have learned guitar, drums, synthesisers, whatever, and have labelled themselves musicians. They’re performing poodles who meekly accepted being house-trained. That’s of no interest to me: acquiescing to yet another kind of restraint, in this case, definitions of profession and prescriptions of acceptable sounds.

CAJ: You’ve been critical of artists’ dependence on Australia Council grants, yet you’ve received several grants yourself. Can you explain that contradiction?

Autonomy: There’s no contradiction. It’s called learning from experience. I realised that I was in danger of becoming a tame, domesticated artist. It’s simple: if you get a grant it’s because you’ve become acceptable to the bureaucracy that distributes them. It dawned on me that I’d traded freedom for security. As the proverb says, it’s like selling your breeches to buy a wig. Worse, I saw the artists who got grants continued to cast themselves heroically, as if they were still making brave choices like Gauguin heading off to Polynesia or Van Gogh impoverishing himself for the sake of his painting. Pfftt!! The reality is that grants are the art industry equivalent of battery-cages for chickens. But there are so few eggs.

CAJ: You had to get work in regional abattoirs to support yourself. Is that a better option?

Autonomy: Yes, absolutely! It brought me freedom and inspiration. I worked for six months each year in the boning room where I developed skills that made me readily employable when I needed money. And when I’d had enough of that, I lived with liberty and did my art, such as it is, until my money ran out. Then I worked in the boning room again. The other immense benefit was that abattoir work gave me deep respect for the instinctive life of animals.

CAJ: Frustration seems to be a recurring motif in your conversation and a trigger for your performances. What in particular frustrates you?

Autonomy: Primarily this: that we believe certain things but we build ramshackle half-way houses well short of where our beliefs would lead us. But again, that presupposes notions of logical coherence and integrity: more arbitrary rules. We can’t escape them. We’re trapped whatever we do, or don’t do. Thought and action seem almost futile. Madness might have as much credibility as rationality.

At this point the interview ended: the artist or being known as Autonomy started to grunt, spit, make popping sounds, mewl and bark.]

Artist’s biography: Autonomy (birth name: Felicity Christina More) b.1980, d.2021. Educated at Katoomba High School; arts training Katoomba TAFE & University of Western Sydney. Recipient of Travelling Art Scholarship. Australian nominated artist, Venice Biennale. Represented: Museum of Contemporary Art, NSW; National Gallery of Victoria; NSW Art Gallery; Blue Mountains Art Gallery; Penrith Regional Gallery.

Gary Furnell, who lives in New South Wales, is a frequent contributor of fiction and non-fiction. An early version of this story appeared in Studio, 2013, Number 126